Body Gender Research Articles

The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging

The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging

Embodied Selves/Disembodied Subjects: Homing the Body in NoViolet Bulawayo’s <i>We Need New Names</i>

Scholars have focused on NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names through its depictions of Africa, borders, and humanitarian aid, but have not yet fully engaged with the gendered aspects of displacement and home in the novel. Central to the text is the main character, Darling’s, longing for a sense of home. Drawing on the concept of ‘homing’, this article examines how Darling’s search for a home is tied to her body and the gendered bodies that surround her. This article argues that Darling can be read as undergoing a journey towards embodiment as she strives to find a home, in both her own body and in the USA; Darling’s body comes to serve as a fraught home, a site where seemingly different worlds collide. It is not until she begins to accept her body and her new destination in the USA that she becomes embodied and moves towards a feeling of home. Ultimately, Bulawayo’s text demonstrates how attention to gendered notions of displacement better allows the reader to understand contemporary migrant experiences in literature.

Peace Negotiations as Sites of Gendered Power Hierarchies

Abstract Since the passage of UNSCR 1325, women’s formal inclusion in peace negotiations has been advocated as a means to pursue gender equality and improve peace outcomes. A narrow focus on inclusion and the embodied presence of women, however, does not address the gendered hierarchies embedded within negotiations. This article highlights how gender functions as a power structure that normalizes masculinity as the operating standard within the practice of peace negotiations. By focusing on the centrality of militarization and masculinity to liberal peacebuilding, I suggest three ways negotiations function as patriarchal institutions: the issues centered as essential peace components; the types of violence that “count” as conflict-related; and the actors deemed legitimate for inclusion. While inclusion is a critical aspect of improving gendered peace outcomes, attention to gendered bodies must include recognition of gender as an analytical category that shapes not just who is included but how the process is built.

(Re)Embodying the Disembodied Voice of Lyric: The Radio Poems of Derek Walcott and Sylvia Plath

Derek Walcott’s Harry Dernier and Sylvia Plath’s Three Women, two little-known, midcentury radio plays, cultivate characters who sound like the speaker of a lyric poem, even as they foreground the invisible bodies behind the voices. In offering us voices that both invite and obstruct lyric reading, Plath and Walcott make manifest a tension present in all lyric poetry—between the embodied individual, on the one hand, and the lyric speaker, on the other. Harry Dernier parodies prominent instances of poetic address, dramatizing the inadequacy of the Western literary tradition in the face of a real catastrophe. Three Women invites the audience to interpret its speakers lyrically, but then undermines the possibility of such interpretation by pointing to the ways that these voices belong to specific, gendered bodies. In this way, Plath highlights the ambiguity in how the term “voice” is used in relation to lyric and, in this, shapes a critique of lyric voicing.

My Heart is a Knot of Snakes

My Heart is a Knot of Snakes Claire Robbins (bio) My heart is a knot of snakes. They move, a roiling ball, but they remain tangled. I have grown used to the motion in my chest. While I wouldn’t say these snakes protect me, I find myself listening to their movement—when it quickens or dies down. When my snakes wake me up in the middle of the night, I practice stringing my words together. Maybe this way I will have enough to say during the day. My mouth would prefer to fall closed forever, but the snakes keep me up to expectations. I line rows and rows of words up, like stringing beads together. Then I pull the words away and begin in a different order. I practice again and again until the words look, sound, and feel right. Then sometimes I can sleep. Or when my snakes wake me up, I imagine what I will wear the next day—I will myself to decorate my body in new ways. I combine outfits and hairstyles until I settle on one that expresses the textures, the contrasts, the colors, the flair my snakes demand. Because something inside me would prefer to fade, but my snakes demand attention. Here is the problem: I was taught that I would grow up to be a woman, and I was taught that snakes strike fear in the hearts of women. I was taught so much trash as a child: that I was fearfully and wonderfully made; that I was born totally depraved; that women came from the rib of Adam; that the Lord unfolded a sheet of forbidden animals and commanded, eat. I was taught to burn down a house that contained a speck of mold; I was taught that if my parents trained me up in the path of the Lord, when I am old, I will not stray. I was taught to memorize Psalm 23 and Romans 12: your rod and your staff, they comfort me; therefore, I urge you to offer your bodies as living sacrifices; and Romans 8: the mind governed by flesh is death. How could this not harm a child? As a child, I learned lies about my heritage—that one ancestor settled along Lake Michigan and married a Native princess. Every time I am stuck in my writing it is because I come from a long line of liars. I struggle to find real connection to the earth and to the people who came before me. Colonizers came before me. I was taught my ancestors lived in Ireland before they came to the United States. We ate corned beef and cabbage in March. I was taught St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, but some of those snakes—and I know this is true because I feel it is true—hatched [End Page 89] later in me. I have fed and nurtured my snakes. ________ I meet some people from work for a drink; I am working on being more social. After two beers, I feel my mask beginning to slip, my words don’t come as expected; my snakes peer out from inside me. This is why I cannot be around people. There is something wrong with me to where the way I see myself and the way other people see me do not line up. Correction—there is nothing wrong with me; I am trans. I always saw myself as very gender neutral, but many people in our society do not have the ability to see anyone as separate from gender. My outside presentation has swung from fairly feminine by a kind of default, to clothing and other decorations I see as neutral of gendered signifiers, to what I see as masculine. But others only see me as the gendered body I was born in. Some of the people from work apologize for using wrongly gendered language with me. One colleague tells me he needs to practice using my pronouns, and he does need to do this. I practice using gender neutral pronouns and language, like most queer people. Practicing this makes it come easier. But what my colleague doesn’t acknowledge is...

Disco flamboyance, performative masculinities and dancer heroes of Bengali cinema

ABSTRACT In this paper, I attempt to study the different determinants of cinematic masculinities, the gendered bodies of male performer figures and their changing patterns with reference to film dance from the 1980s-1990s period of Bengali popular cinema. This paper explores how the inclusion of performative male bodies in the dance numbers brought a distinct imagination of masculinity and flamboyance, thereby disrupting the established idea of the bhadra (the polished and gentle class of Bengal) hero of Bengali cinema. In the first section of my article, I focus on how the disco sensation and its cinematic registers took a new form with Mithun Chakraborty’s figuration in Bengali film dances. The second section studies how this pattern of dancing male bodies and its flamboyance changed in the later period when the imagination of a working class male protagonist intervened in film dance in the 1990s. In brief, I try to read the shifting imaginations of masculinities in Bengali film dance from the disco flamboyance and ‘global-national-popular model’ of Mithun Chakraborty’s star persona in the 1980s to the more localized and hybrid form of dance idioms in Prosenjit’s iconic film roles in a later period.

Self-Defense Training to Reduce the Fear of Violence Among Women and Girls

Community contributes to the experience of fear and risk of violence within a girl’s and woman’s lived reality. Girls and women also try to navigate an internalized gendered body discourse that deems them not capable of self-protection. The purpose of this research was twofold. First, this research describes self-defense in navigating gender violence expectations in their daily lives to fill the gap in self-defense literature for women's self-empowerment. Second to begin understanding how empowered self-defense could address the fear of high-risk environments and increase confidence. The study took place in Tijuana, Mexico, in 2017. The post-self-defense seminar questionnaires indicated that all the women understood the risk of violence and the types of violence encountered. Ninety-eight percent of the participants stated they would use real-life techniques in potential confrontations. This improved capability of using techniques can reduce perceived fear of violence by this group of women and girls in Tijuana, Mexico.

Clinical factors and pre-surgical depression scores predict pain intensity in cardiac surgery patients

BackgroundSevere pain is prevalent in cardiac surgery patients and can increase cardiac complications, morbidity and mortality. The objectives of the study were to assess perioperative pain intensity and to assess predictors of pain post-cardiac surgery, including clinical characteristics and depression.MethodsA total of 98 cardiac surgery patients were included in the study. Pain intensity was assessed using a Numerical Rating System. Pain was measured one day pre-operatively and recorded daily from Post-operative Day 2 to Day 7. Clinical data were recorded and depression scores were assessed using the Center for Epidemiological Study of Depression (CES-D).ResultsPain intensity increased significantly during hospitalization from pre-operative levels, surging at 2 days post-operatively. Predictors of high pain intensity were high pre-operative CES-D scores, female gender, cardiac function, smoking and high body mass index (BMI). Significantly higher pre-operative CES-D scores were found in patients with severe pain compared to patients with no pain to moderate pain (18.23 ± 1.80 vs 12.84 ± 1.22, p = 0.01 pre-operatively). Patients with severe pain (NRS 7–10) had significantly higher levels of white blood cells (WBC) compared to patients with no pain-moderate pain (NRS 0–6), (p = 0.01). However, CES-D scores were only weakly correlated maximum WBC levels perioperatively.ConclusionPain intensity significantly increased following surgery, and was associated with depressive symptoms, female sex, cardiac function, BMI, and smoking. These factors may serve as a basis for identification and intervention to help prevent the transition from acute pain to chronic pain.

“I’m Described as Good Journalist Because I Am ‘Tough’”: How Femininity Is Still Considered a Weakness in Zimbabwean Newsrooms

ABSTRACT This paper investigates journalism practice and newsroom cultures in both private and state media companies in Zimbabwe. The paper moves beyond the gender body count to analyse journalists’ cultural interpretations of their everyday work and actions and how this contributes to the structuring of power relations in the newsrooms. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 journalists from selected Zimbabwean newsrooms to unearth their lived experiences of the profession. Using the journalism culture concept, feminist standpoint epistemology and intersectionality, the study found out that Zimbabwean journalists continue to experience gender biases owing to cultural interpretations of the roles of women and men; increasing subtle sexual harassment from both media managers, male colleagues and sources; and deliberate silencing of women’s voices. Further, a poor performing economy contributes to unethical journalism practices. The study also reveals how gender intersects with other social norms such as the location/positioning of women, ethnicity, age, and years of experience in the newsroom to further dis-privilege female journalists. There are deliberate efforts by journalists (both male and female) to employ feminist journalism—with the goal of contributing towards a journalistic culture that is non-oppressive.

The Body Politics of Gendered Subjects in Indonesian Post-Reform Films

The phenomenon of power, exercised through the issue of gender and sexuality, is represented in Indonesia along with different regimes. However, the gendered body becomes the target of experienced body politics. Thus, this article aims at investigating the body politics of the gendered subjects as revealed in Indonesian Post-Reform films entitled The Dancer (Sang Penari) and Memories of My Body (Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku). This study used the narrative method by applying Yuval-Davis’ theory. Through these two films, this paper argues that the intersection of gender and sexuality leads to the othering process of the gendered body through the notion of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Further, the ambivalence construction of motherhood, which essentially deals with femininity, is practised toward the gendered bodies. However, the power relation positions the gendered subjects paradoxically by mystifying their body and also demystifying their existence. This shifting is operated under altered discourse in different regimes. Further, biopower is exercised not only by regulating the body but also by subjugating them through sexual slander. Indeed, it leads them to be demonized as PKI regarding the regime’s agenda in maintaining the Indonesian collective trauma of the 1965 Genocide. However, the gendered subjects define themselves as a subject through their agency by submitting to the master narrative.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Gendering Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Commercial Surrogacy and Constructions of Motherhood

Literature on commercial surrogacy argues that assisted reproduction technologies (ARTs) problematise presumed essentialist dichotomies of nature and culture. While technologies of commercial surrogacy naturalise the medicalisation of the body, these technologies in turn also produce new knowledge about the biological facts of the body. In what ways are knowledge about reproductive labour and women’s reproductive capacities embedded in these technologies? How do these technologies invite us to imagine maternal bodies? Under regimes of stratified reproduction that inflect reproductive bodies with caste, class and racial politics, how do we read the production of the gendered body within commercial gestational surrogacy practices? The paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in Mumbai to study how technologies of commercial surrogacy interact with the normative idioms of conception. I will attempt to show how assumptions about gendered bodies and gendered roles are embedded within the material teleologies of these technologies, which in turn produce newer material-semiotic significations of the reproductive body.

Gender, morality and violence in anthropomorphic metaphors depicted in Canadian political humor

ABSTRACT This article considers the historical and ongoing use of gendered anthropomorphic metaphors in Canadian political humor. It asks how national and sub-national identities have been articulated through gendered bodies in Canadian political humor and what types of underlying cultural and ideological assumptions about citizenship are expressed in these metaphors? Two case studies of Canadian political humor were conducted and analysed through the lens of feminist critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal a tendency for political humor to use anthropomorphic metaphors to enforce cultural understandings of acceptable and unacceptable forms of citizenship. These discussions are highly gendered and often exist in conversation with intersectional issues such as race and class. Overall, these metaphors enforce the acceptability of white masculinity in Canadian social, political, and cultural rhetoric while framing femininity as a precursor to undesirable forms of citizenship.

Гендерные перспективы представления пространства в романе Вирджинии Вулф «Миссис Дэллоуэй»

Gender aspects of Virginia Woolf’s writings have become an immensely expanded field of interdisciplinary research in the West. In Russia, however, they remain quite little known. The article focuses on the gender-spatial division of space in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Drawing from a number of Marxist philosophical and literary conceptions of modernist space and, mostly, from the literary narrative methodology, the authors present a model of interrelations between the narrative social and personal spaces from the perspectives of the two protagonists and of the collective character, that is, various minor characters sharing post-Edwardian societal norms. Literary narrative approach makes it possible to characterize the modernist traits of Virginia Woolf’s novel which she shared with the contemporary writers and her individual, specifically Woolfian literary inventions. One of them consists in a specific use of free indirect discourse imitating the perceptions of the two gender-opposite realities, namely, the “material” reality of the actual story world and the mental reality of the subjective experiences from the protagonists’ pasts. The other is Woolf’s innovative contribution to feminist writing. It may be described as a representation of the female “modernist body” via the female protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness saturated with meaningful gaps. The obtained results include specifying Woolf’s gender principle of structuring her narrative space and the alternations of the female protagonist’s two bodies, which are her gender body “for others” and her mental “modernist” body freed from social limitations.

The Seduction of Femininity: A Critical Scrutiny of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé

This study covers how the femme fatale image is constructed socially, literarily and culturally. The femme fatale character, which has been the target of works in a variety of literary and visual fields, including painting, writing, and film, from the nineteenth century to the present, incorporates conceptual lines that enable us to explore the gender regime and body policies of contemporary society. The construction of the femme fatale originated as a result of the patriarchal structure’s anxieties, fears, and reflexes toward female subjectivity, which has become more prevalent in public life as a consequence of modernization. Traditional ideological tools that associate women’s bodies with mystery, cruelty, and tragedy have been replicated as a result of the debates surrounding this image, and gender-based regulatory policies targeting women have been used to gain discursive legitimacy using these tools. In this regard, the femme fatale has been portrayed as a feminine-other who is negatively associated with patriarchal society’s gender regime. The dialogue between context and text will be used to analyse the plays. This research is historically contextualized by taking into account Victorian women's ideology. The historical and cultural context in which the femme fatale image originated was first analysed, and then the femme fatale representations in Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salomé, which was created in this context, were studied from a feminist discourse as a sample. The current inquiry mirrors another dimension of women’s serious vicissitudes they had to put up with back then which imperceptibly laid the foundation for reawakening women all around the world of their natural and basic rights they have been deprives for centuries under patriarchy. The feminist theory will be utilized to examine Wilde’s play.

The Gendered Body in Verse: Jacob of Serugh and Romanos Melodos on the Woman with a Flow of Blood

Abstract This article examines the reception history of the story of the woman with a flow of blood as recounted in Mark 5:25–34, Matthew 9:20–22, and Luke 8:43–48 within the writings of two late antique poets: Jacob of Serugh (ca. 451–521 CE) and Romanos Melodos (b. ca. 485 CE). In their poetic compositions, Jacob and Romanos retell and interpret biblical stories employing narrative expansions and the attribution of imagined speech. The Syriac poet, Jacob of Serugh, wrote in the form of narrative poems, or mēmrē, while Romanos perfected the form of the Greek kontakion. Like prose homilies, these poems reached Christians from across the social spectrum, providing spiritual instruction and delighting audiences. Previous reception histories of this biblical narrative have largely overlooked late antique and early Byzantine poetry performed within the liturgical space. In addition to filling this lacuna in scholarship, this article also highlights how these understudied poems contribute to our understanding of early Christian discourses of (im)purity. Romanos emphasizes the symbolic value of the gendered body, blending the imagery of stain, impurity, and sin. In contrast, Jacob’s lexical choices and poetic style underscore the woman’s physical and emotional strife. Through speech and the description of the woman’s bodily state, both poets provide dramatic depictions of the woman’s encounter with Jesus that enrich our understanding of how late antique Christians interpreted this biblical story.

‘My whole body is at work’: the silence of gendered body techniques in cork industry in an era of automation

Discourses about technological transformation tend to focus on technology, as if its introduction was neutral regarding local variabilities, and the men and women that make it effective. This paper focuses on the technical act. The body is where the technical acts are inscribed and it is through the body that they are exteriorised. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the operative modes associated with the technical acts, from a gender perspective, in the context of the technological transformation in cork industry. The analysis of the work activity performed by men (punching operators) and women (choosers) was supported by observations, collective interviews, and group sessions to validate the results. The findings show male- and female-specific body techniques; how the efficacy of the technical acts contributes to the debate about the limits of technology; and how body techniques and effects on health tend to remain in silence due to automation. Practitioner summary: The reconfiguration of the human-machine relationships hardly leaves room for the analysis of how the body techniques evolve. This paper shows how the efficacy of men and women body techniques contributes to the debate about the limits of technology, even if these uses of one’s body entail health costs.

The entanglements of the law, digital technologies and domestic violence in Seattle

This paper draws on a community-based participatory action research project located in Seattle - before and during the COVID-19 pandemic - to examine the unanticipated impact that the pandemic has had on reducing barriers for survivors of domestic violence seeking protection through the legal system. We draw on interviews with survivors and victim advocates, along with autoethnographic participant observation during Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) hearings, to trace survivors’ experiences navigating the DVPO process before and after its transition from an analogue to digital system. We situate this research at the intersection of legal and digital geographic scholarship to analyze how the law and digital technologies reinforce the spatial operation of power and exclusion, while they simultaneously provide emancipatory potential for women’s experiences of security, legal subjectivity and emotional personhood. By focusing on how the courts’ transition to a digital system affects the emotional personhood and legal subjectivity of domestic violence survivors, this paper advances feminist calls within legal and digital geographies scholarship that encourage more sustained engagement with feminist thought to understand the varied effects of the law and digital technologies – respectively – on gendered bodies.

‘Beautiful’ Medicine: Gender Segregation by Medical Specialty in Ukraine

In Ukraine and in other former Soviet socialist republics, women make up a sizeable majority of those practicing medicine—a proportion estimated at around 70% over the course of the 20th century. Women predominate in most specialties, including prestigious disciplines such as cardiology or oncology, with the stark exception of surgical fields. While gender segregation by medical specialty has often been explained as women having been channelled out from more lucrative fields and into less prestigious medical specialties such as primary care, I suggest that broader sociopolitical and cultural forces are primarily responsible for this horizontal segregation. The central pillars of Ukraine’s dominant version of femininity—motherhood and beauty—gain special place in the nation’s decolonisation process and position women to take up medicine as a profession, while simultaneously preventing them from specialising in surgery in the same high numbers. In medical school and at work, gendered bodies are read to be in the right or wrong place as communities of practice informally instruct students and young practitioners about how easy or difficult it will be for them to belong to certain subfields. ‘Beautiful’ (non-surgical) specialties enhance women’s cultural authority even if they are not always as well-remunerated as the surgical ones. They permit flexible schedules and career paths, connote social grace, and solidify women’s central role in families, and ultimately in national reproduction.

Bordered and Borderless Materialities of COVID-19: A Narrative Exploration

The emergence of COVID-19 as a distinct biomedical bordered and borderless site for anthropological exploration has sparked change in the biomedical imagination. Recent work in bio-cultural anthropology has offered important insights regarding the materiality and multiplicities, the realities and generalities, and the possibilities and police-abilities of COVID-19 related social and political concerns (e.g., Briggs 2020; Manderson & Devine 2020). This paper, however, asks anthropologists to reflect on bordered and borderless bodies that would typically invite historical and medical analysis owing to their substantial explorations of prolonged intersectional placement and occupation – “the gendered and racialized body”. Can anthropology, specifically medical or biocultural anthropology, as a reflexive practice, shed new light on the materiality of the gendered and racialized body that have conventionally been left to historical and medical interpretation? How does the use a reflexive anthropology of bordered and borderless bodies challenge neoliberal logics of exploration, discussion, analysis, or claims-making associated with the body as a site? Reflexive and critical autoethnographic medical anthropology challenges anthropologists to de-naturalize the dichotomy between wellness and illness, and to instead think of biomedical assemblages as (re)configurations, (re)imaginations, and (re)workings of reflexive and radical processes. This paper originates from cross-disciplinary explorations of the borderlands of health and illness, including from anthropological traditions that have long engaged with the contemporary as part of their wider praxis, such as Indigenous, Latinx, Black Feminist, and Queer anthropologies. I combine ethnographic methods with illness as material culture analysis, whether that be of objects of space and place, gendered bodies, or cultural and medical landscapes to address the interrelatedness of biomedical materiality.